Legislators Rethink Vietnam

WASHINGTON — Although it never officially sanctioned the Vietnam War, Congress is now trying to start it.

A provision in the Senate would set the official beginning of the Vietnam War as Feb. 28, 1961.

The purpose of the measure, a section of the Senate's Veterans' Compensation Cost-of-Living Adjustment Act of 1988, is to extend eligibility for wartime veterans benefits and pensions to those who served in combat before Aug. 5, 1964, the starting date now on federal books. On that day President Lyndon Johnson notified Congress that U.S. Navy destroyers had been attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin.

For many historians, what happened on Feb. 28, 1961, is less apparent.

''If we took the 100 most knowledgeable people about the Vietnam War, the date would not mean anything,'' said Prof. Douglas Pike, director of the Indochina studies program at the University of California at Berkeley.

The February 1961 date is the start of the conflict for some Internal Revenue Service tax exemptions, which cover the missing in action and prisoners of war. But for all other combat troops, federal tax codes use 1964, said IRS spokesman Wilson Fadely. Eligibility for the Army's Combat Infantryman's Badge and for foreign combat awards also depends on the 1961 date.

Congressional aides explain the selection of the proposed date as the time American military advisers began to accompany Vietnamese military operations in the field.

Pike, who arrived in Vietnam in the fall of 1960 to join the 600 American advisers there, said, ''I went on military operations in December 1960. Americans were going on military operations two years before that.''

The Senate approved the date shift in the last two Congresses, but the measure did not make it to the House. A free-standing bill, now in the House Veterans' Affairs Committee, would start the war on March 1, 1961.

Walter Capps, a professor of religious studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara and who teaches a course about the Vietnam era, said, ''You can't change history that way, not by legislation.''

Some Vietnam experts suggested the law should extend as far back as the first American casualty -- 1959.